Cloud - Offers The Chance For New And More Specific Tools To Be Developed

A colleague recently showed me an advert for a product I had worked on back in 2005, which had been a response to the problem of processing scale required for the nascent Digital Cinema versioning industry. The idea was to harness spare processing power of render-farm infrastructure in post houses for creating Digital Cinema Packages.

That same year, Amazon was privately launching its latest business, Amazon Web Services (AWS), to a small number of hand-picked customers. AWS was offering computer resource on demand, utilising the spare capacity of Amazon's existing infrastructure. Skip to 2018 and AWS saw 45% growth in its last quarter heading towards annual revenues of nearly $20Bn and Microsoft's Azure cloud offering grew a phenomenal 98% in the same quarter. Cloud is undeniably here, and much of it is invisible to the everyday user, yet it permeates almost all the technology we use and the entertainment we enjoy.

The entertainment industry still seems to have a cautious tension with cloud adoption, both embracing it to its fullest extent with 100% cloud deployed streaming services abound, and yet significant nervousness around high value pre-release content being handled in the cloud. However, better understanding of how to handle security in such sensitive situations, combined with the compelling enabling power of cloud is forcing it to the forefront of technology decisions for the media business. The financial and operational advantages of cloud are well proven across pretty much every industry, but what does this offer to enhance the creative process?

One obvious advantage is scale on demand. Many big players in the visual effects arena now augment their render farm capacity by bursting their workloads into the cloud at peak times. Sophisticated management software allows them to do so seamlessly and this gains time back to the creative process and keeps the client in a more comfortable place for delivery schedules. It has also enabled tools, that were simply too process intensive to run cost effectively in owned infrastructure, to come to market. One such example is RealD's phenomenal TrueImage tool which rebuilds images in time, space and spectrum on a pixel level to remove noise issues and bring original textures and detail back into the image. This software hits processing really hard, using tens of thousands of compute cores simultaneously to process feature length content. In the cloud, that processing is readily available and there is no operation impact on the user, i.e. you're not bumping other work to run a TrueImage pass.

There is also an advantage at the burgeoning versioning end of the workflow. As both broadcasters and studios look to maximise their international markets, localisation is a huge growth area. However the traditionally manual work required comes at the end of the production and post process and so naturally, if there is a hard stop release date, this eats into the film-makers' time on the show. This has been a big area of growth for Sundog, where we have seen a significant increase in use of our cloud platform and automation to massively reduce the time and errors associated with manual process, and the scale limitations of on premises equipment. This is giving breathing space back to both the film-making and distribution cycles.

The subject of AI applications cannot go unmentioned here. All major cloud providers also have integrated and rapidly evolving machine learning and deep learning tools, which they are putting at their customers' disposal with off the shelf solutions for everything from audience analytics to dialogue translation, from emotional content analysis to actor and logo recognition. On top of this, cloud offers the opportunity for new and more specific tools to be developed and continuously learn from new content. This will undoubtedly see a huge amount of new solutions coming to market for the creative process in the very near future. Already tools for image analysis and natural language processing are manifesting themselves in edit assist applications.

Combined with cloud backed remote editing, collaboration tools and powerful pre-vis, the art of editing is being transformed. The editor and their craft is moving closer (and on) to the set and having dramatically reduced time to prep for post and VFX. This does of course have implications for the changing nature of creative roles and, as in so many other industries, there are concerns that there is an existential threat of AI to the labour market. I am personally optimistic that AI offers a step change in the reduction of repetitive and boring (ultimately not truly creative) tasks, freeing creative talent to focus on their art and not be constrained by the limitations of the technology and process in pursuing their vision.

In 2005, cloud compute was unknown to all but a very few, more recently it was another technology band wagon with too much hype. However as it reaches a level of maturity and ubiquity, it has become clear that it is a technology that is truly transformative and will continue to have a deepening and positive impact on our industry and lives in general.

Author: Richard Welsh, Co-Founder and CEO, Sundog Media Toolkit.

This article is also available in the May edition of Broadcast Film & Video.

www.sundogtools.com